From the consolidation of the industrial press and the strengthening of democratic regimes, in the mid-nineteenth century, journalism establishes itself as the main source of information for the population, based on criteria and norms regulating the activity; journalistic practice is now understood as a fundamental expert system for the defense of society, human rights and democracy, which has been called the fourth power. The informative hegemony of journalism remained stable throughout the 20th century, being the main mechanism for training and mobilizing public opinion. At the turn of the 21st century, with the arrival of interactive platforms of web 2.0, the journalistic field undergoes changes. Online social media allows the production and circulation of parallel narratives of all types and purposes with wide reach of visualization, dissemination and mobilization of the audience connected to networks, coming to an end professional journalistic hegemony as a source of information and mobilization of public opinion. At a time when professional and amateur journalists merge into the role of content producers and distributors, journalism, which happens in the network, faces new challenges. The powerful audience starts to interfere directly in journalistic making in various ways, including dialoguing with the vehicles and each other on social media platforms. Associated with this new scenario, we have the emergence of the culture of disinformation and a strategy of disqualification of journalism and valorization of parallel narratives in favor of political interests, especially in governments with a more authoritarian bias. Faced with this complex scenario, where journalism faces an unprecedented crisis, both in the economic sphere and related to its reputation and credibility before society, this study emerges. Through the new dynamics of interaction of the audience with journalism, we seek to identify and understand the imaginary of the connected audience in relation to contemporary professional journalism. The corpus of the research consisted of the discursive sequences (comments) of readers of the newspapers O Globo, Estadão and The Intercept Brasil linked to the articles on pension reform published in the period from July to December 2019 on the social networking site Facebook. Through the analysis of the comments discourse, we were able to identify the functions, values and deviations of journalism present in the readers imagination, presented in this thesis. We also promote with a dialogue of the questions raised by the audience with the main theories of journalism. We believe that to understand the perception of the audience in relation to journalism is necessary to find ways to rescue journalism as an expert system, fundamental to the survival of democracy.